On May 20 and 21st, I was working at the “lifestreaming/blogging” station at the social media cafe at the iCitizen conference. The conference itself had the standard speakers and panels, and the cafe was a supplementary opportunity for conference delegates to learn more about, well, social media. There were four stations: “lifestreaming/blogging”, “community conversations”, “new media entertainment”, and “mobile”. Resource Interactive employees manned each of the stations, showcasing some of these new and emerging sites and services.
For the lifestreaming station, we started with a targeted platform/service base of wordpress, tumblr, twitter, facebook, flickr, digsby and socialthing!. I mentioned in an earlier post that in preparation for this event, I was reflecting on my current online persona. This was because in order to cut down on some of the noise related to showcasing these tools, I wasn’t really myself during the conference. In order to show people how these tools worked, I was officially “iCitizen04″ for awhile. That is, I would show people how to use these different tools (and how they connected) using the moniker iCitizen04. As it was, there was PLENTY of online iCitizen buzz, and I didn’t want to inundate my regular followers with our test posts. (According to summize.com, we were actually the #1 trending topic on twitter for much of the day!)
Overall, it was really interesting to chat with individuals, trying to figure out what the buzz was all about. Some folks were already well-established twitterers, while others were just catching a glimmer of what this service could do for them.
In the true nature of lifestreaming, looking back at the output from the conference tells a bit of the story about the event itself. the icitizen04 tumblog pulls in tweets and photos, as well as other posts, pictures and videos I posted as I spoke to different participants at the event. We looked at the services themselves and I also liked mention Summize and Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com) to illustrate how brands could use twitter as a very simplified version of buzz metrics. Searching for a brand on flickr or youtube was a good way to see what sort of user-generated content was already out there, and in both cases, identify some of those potential brand advocates (or see what sort of risk mitigation needs to take place!).
I was always very happy to introduce folks to digsby, which is an Uber-IM Client. It supports instant messaging, multiple web mail services, facebook and twitter. You can send and receive updates right from your desktop. It was a great service to be able to illustrate the ease at content pushes and updates.
Overall, I was really excited by what we were able to pull off during the course of the event. I have some more thoughts on the event itself, but I just wanted to specifically call out the social media cafe aspect of it.
Oh, and I HAVE to share the video some of my co-workers pulled together:
iCitizen Video from Mark Hillman on Vimeo.
If you’re ever hungry for blog topics, I’d love to hear (uh, read) what tools you use and why… interested in the motivations that move real-live-young people (not adopters like me) from intrigue to adoption.
thanks for the suggestion, Leigh!
I was actually thinking that I should have prepped for iCitizen with reference cards for what I shared. I may do a few posts that are basically just “5 minutes to {XYZ}” tool or service” just so I can share them around should someone ask again!
The problem is that I think we all have such differing backgrounds and motivations. Over the few days I did develop a bit of an elevator speech in term of why brands should care about twitter and how tumblr could facilitate buzz monitoring, but it’s hard to know in general where someone’s motivation (and previous exposure/experience) comes into play.